Abstract

Since 1989, I have worked as an art therapist with approximately 1000 Cree individuals aged from 3 to 90 years old mostly in Northern Quebec Cree communities. In this thesis, I developed a comprehensive analysis of the nature of my Cree patients' experiences in art therapy and showed how art therapy is a means of revealing some contradictory and ambiguous tendencies in the construction of the modern Cree Self.

The focus is on the people of the James Bay region of Northern Quebec. This thesis is not an overview of the Cree people as such but about individual experience with trauma, how it is perceived, defined and narrated within the art therapy context, and how culture becomes an issue for my Cree patients in their healing process. Some traumas are possibly a result of their experience of political domination and cultural repression by Euro-Canadians.

I began this research with the idea of exploring reasons for my Cree patients' response to art therapy. It gradually evolved into an analysis of how art therapy becomes a ritualized space where mytho poetic thought is evoked and where my patients and I transcend the immediate communication and emotional barriers between Cree and Euro-Canadian individuals. Often times with my Cree patients, art therapy becomes a sacred ritual in that it helps re-establish personal harmony through individuation. Through my analysis I developed a better understanding of the metonymic links my patients often make between art therapy and their experience in the bush, both constituting a place to re-affirm their notions of Self.

In Chapter 1, the introduction, I developed the hypotheses thoroughly. I situated my thesis vis à vis past and current anthropological research and showed how this thesis makes a significant contribution to anthropology, specifically in the area of anthropology of the Self. Chapter 2 outlined the ethnographic, cultural and historical contexts of the Quebec Cree. In Chapter 3, I explored Cree styles of communication as demonstrated in both our clinical and ethnographic engagement. I addressed the patterns of hierarchy and indirection in Cree conversation and emotional discourse, and the Cree perception of human relationship as recounted in their narratives of Self and their relationship with me.

Chapter 4 explored specific elements of Cree mytho-poetic thought as I have been introduced to it, such as narrative discourse, metonymic and metaphoric associations as exemplified in animal-doctor relationships. In Chapter 5, I developed my argument of art therapy as a form of ritual activity. I showed how the physical space of art therapy (i.e. the structure and its limitations) becomes a place of meaning and what appears to be a metaphoric condensation of place and Self. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)